Healthcare today is implemented as an open-loop system. Patients are diagnosed by a physician and prescribed treatment. However, there are not many reliable systems capable of monitoring whether the patient is complying with or adhering to the instructions given by the physician. Studies have shown that if patients stop taking their medication for three days, they are unlikely to resume their regimen.
Patients may access the wrong medications at the wrong times. Patients may double-dose on medication if they forgot they have already taken their prescribed dose. Children, and other unauthorized users, can break-in to existing pill-containers and remove pills. Patients can intentionally overdose on medications. There is a large problem of diversion with controlled substances such as pain medications or opioid-withdrawal medication, such that patients sometimes illicitly sell or give away these medications in bulk.
One approach to ensure adherence to medical prescriptions is the use of various medicine-dispensing devices for dispensing medicines to users. Such devices typically have multiple compartments for storing medicines. While some of these medical dispensing devices can be programmed to dispense medicines at an appropriate medication schedule, a user can access multiple compartments of the device at the same time.
Healthcare workers at a medical facility are typically entrusted with the task of monitoring patients within the facility. Typically, healthcare workers use a time clock to record the time of day on a medication record when interacting with a patient. However, because this is a manual mechanism, there may be potential for inaccuracies. Moreover, manual mechanisms or systems may not be an efficient way to monitor a patient's adherence rate.
Additionally, interaction monitoring is important in situations where a healthcare provider is interacting with patients. A central monitoring system can be used to determine whether the healthcare worker is performing his/her duties. One example includes a nurse or orderly in a nursing home environment who must do daily rounds. Another example is a healthcare worker taking part in a DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course) program, such as is used in many tuberculosis treatments. This approach can be applied to any scenario where one person must interact with several others and this interaction may need to be monitored.
Current monitoring systems include computerized attendance systems that can read a unique employee number and other data from an identification badge when the employee arrives and departs the workplace. The acquired employee identification data are transmitted and recorded in a central monitoring device along with the current date and time. However, such systems may not be capable of recording the state of the patient's adherence rate unless manually entered by the healthcare worker.